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Featured RSS: Human Communication Research

Welcome!

As the librarian for the Brian Lamb School of Communication, I consult, collaborate, and communicate with students and faculty affiliated with the School. I teach classes and workshops on accessing and using information sources, and I provide one-on-one consultations in person and via email. I also purchase new books, journals, multimedia, and other resources related to studies in communication.

Each tab on this site includes resources geared towards different research areas in the School: Health Communication, Interpersonal Communication, etc. The Publishing & Research Tools tab provides information about organizing, citing, and determining impact of research. The Course Pages tab includes pages tailored for specific Communication courses. Please contact me, via contact information on the right, about research and instructional support, accessing or purchasing resources, or suggestions for this website.

I look forward to working with you!

- Catherine

Featured New Books

"... provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology, and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past fifteen years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks, and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots. She situates these efforts in a historical context in order to show the origins of contemporary communication activism, and its linkages to media reform campaigns and policy advocacy."

"... N. J. Enfield outlines a framework for analyzing social interaction and its linguistic, cultural, and cognitive underpinnings by focusing on human relationships. This is a naturalistic approach to human sociality, grounded in the systematic study of real-time data from social interaction in everyday life."

"Partisan news has been roundly castigated for reinforcing prior beliefs and contributing to the highly polarized political environment we have today, but there is little evidence to support this claim, and much of what we know about the impact of news media come from studies that were conducted at a time when viewers chose from among six channels rather than scores. Through a series of innovative experiments, Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson show that such criticism is unfounded. Americans who watch cable news are already polarized, and their exposure to partisan programming of their choice has little influence on their political positions. In fact, the opposite is true: viewers become more polarized when forced to watch programming that opposes their beliefs. A much more troubling consequence of the ever-expanding media environment, the authors show, is that it has allowed people to tune out the news: the four top-rated partisan news programs draw a mere three percent of the total number of people watching television. Overturning much of the conventional wisdom, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? demonstrate that the strong effects of media exposure found in past research are simply not applicable in today's more saturated media landscape."